(First Edition, with Bookplate signed by Fulvio Testa) Though one of the best-known stories in the world, Pinocchio at the same time remains largely obscure, linked in many minds to the Walt Disney movie that bears little relation to the splendid original. Carlo Collodi's story about a puppet who, after many travails, succeeds in becoming a "real boy" is hardly a sentimental or morally improving tale. To the contrary, Pinocchio is one of the great subversives of the written page, a madcap genius hurtled along at the pleasure and mercy of his desires, a renegade who in many ways resembles his near-contemporary Huck Finn. The book itself is a great invention of modern literature, merging the traditions of street theater, the picaresque, and folk and fairy tales into a dreamlike work of adventure, satire, and enchantment that anticipates surrealism and magical realism. In this New York Review of Books edition, for readers and listeners of all ages, Geoffrey Brock's acclaimed 2009 translation is paired with more than 50 full-page watercolors by Italian artist and children's book author Fulvio Testa, who adopts a naive, almost impudent style for his illustrations, as though the ever-impetuous puppet decided to draw his own story.

"The superiority of the Collodi original to the Disney adaptation lies in its reluctance to make the inner motivations of the story explicit.... No less than Proust's novel in search of lost time, [Collodi's] story is a search for his lost childhood."—Paul Auster